Hop Alley

by Scott Phillips

  I reversed direction and walked alongside her, slowing my pace to accommodate her short legs and limited wind. “And how is your sister? Improved, I hope?”

  “Much improved, thank you.” She seemed to take no pleasure from this, and we were silent until we reached our front door.

  “I’ll resume my promenade, then. Good evening, Mrs. Fenster.”

  “Good evening, Mr. Sadlaw.”

  She disappeared into the house, clutching her handbag. Before I started walking again I saw another silhouette wobbling in my direction. It was the boy, hopped up presumably and likely as not just back from a Market Street whorehouse.

  “Evening, Mister,” he said as he came to the door.

  “Evening, Lem,” I replied, and I resumed my walk.

  SCHRAFFT’S WAS THE only illuminated structure on its block, its entryway a rectangle of washed-out, undetailed yellowish white. Within it was considerably quieter than the previous evening, and the fog spilled inside the enclosure to lay low about the floor. The bartender nodded at me. “Time for one drink, then I’m closing.”

  “Thought you were open all night.”

  “Some Saturdays we are. On a night like tonight we might as well go with the laws and shut down at midnight.” He spoke with a German accent, southern, I thought, though it was hard to tell in English.

  He drew me a beer and I paid my ten cents, and he went back to his conversation with a red-faced gent whose hat had fallen off twice in the minute and a half I’d been there. There was no orchestra tonight, and no women to dance with anyway. The half dozen patrons scattered throughout the establishment were silent and grim-faced, and I wasn’t overly sorry to be chased out.

  Then without warning, six or seven feet away from me, one rummy stood halfway up from his bench and gave his neighbor a good sock in the jaw, with remarkable accuracy and speed for a man as deeply in his cups as he appeared to be. There was a clacking as of teeth colliding unexpectedly and the second man went down with a high-pitched cry of alarm and pain as the first man stood over him hard-eyed and panting. “That’s for what you said about my wife, you damned hunk of dogshit.”

  “I didn’t say nothing about your wife, you was the one saying things. All’s I said was ‘uh-huh’ and nodded my head.” Blood and spittle leaked from his mouth, and his lisp sounded like a loosened incisor or maybe a bitten tongue.

  “Agreeing’s the same as saying it,” the first man said, and he stalked out the front door with the bartender’s wary eyes trained on him.

  When he was out the bartender stared at the fallen man, and when he had his attention he said simply, “Out.”

  “Hell, Jakey, I didn’t do nothing, he just up and hit me for no reason.”

  “I said out, and if you want to come back tomorrow, you’ll do what I tell you.”

  Grumbling, the defeated man rose, wiped his gory lip onto his filthy shirtsleeve, and shambled past me to the door. The smell of fresh blood played counterpoint above the deeper, dankish odor of his clothing, and the whole sad tableau evoked, not unhappily, memories of my own saloonkeeping days. I looked back at the bartender and saw that he held a billy club, slapping it into his left hand one, two, three.

  “Some nights is nothing but trouble,” he said. “You’d think charging a dime a glass we’d lose some of that trade.”

  I nodded and took another drink from my glass and then set it, two-thirds full, on the bar and walked away.

  I SLEPT WITHOUT dreams, or without any that I could recall the next morning. Upon waking I made my way to the kitchen table where my morning papers awaited me, the Bulletin atop the pile as usual, and I sensed that Mrs. Fenster and the boy were waiting for me to react to it. The headline was larger than usual, a banner across the front page.

  “Shall I read it?” I asked, and neither one responded. I began:

  MURDERED IN HIS BED!

  OUR PRESSMAN HIRAM COWAN ATTACKED ABED

  AT DOCTOR MARCY’S HOME AND CLINIC—

  DOCTOR MARCY THREATENED WITH A REVOLVER—

  HE IS CO-OPERATING WITH THE POLICE

  Two China-men Were Seen Entering His House—

  They Arrived on Foot and Left the Same Way—

  Police Certain They Are Still in Denver.

  Hiram Cowan, who was yesterday reported to be recovering from the wounds he received from an assassin outside the Silver Star Saloon, was last night shot and killed as he lay unconscious in the clinic of Dr. Hamilton Marcy. Dr. Marcy, having opened his front door to a pair of pigtailed China-men, was quickly held at gunpoint, blindfolded, and forced into a closet with his wrists tied before him. As he worked to remove his bonds he heard a pair of gunshots, and when he managed to open the closet door, which had been blocked shut with a chair, he found his attackers gone, and his patient dead with two shots to the brain pan. Morphine and other opiates were taken from the surgery, though whether robbery or murder was the motive for the deadly visit is undetermined. The doctor has been interviewed at length by the Denver Police Department and has furnished a general description of the apparently kindly Orientals to whom, thinking them in need of medical assistance, he opened his door last night; however, he told the Bulletin, he saw them but for a moment before his life was threatened and his eyes covered. Mr. Cowan, a valued employee of the Bulletin, leaves behind a wife and four children under the age of twenty.

  “SORRY ABOUT YOUR father, Lem.”

  The boy looked confused, as if he couldn’t imagine an appropriate response, and I asked him and Mrs. Fenster if they would require time off of work for the funeral. She shook her head no, and the boy, watching her, followed suit. I ate my breakfast, reading the rest of the Bulletin as I did so, and then took the papers with me to the privy.

  My reading was not particularly conducive to the activity at hand, consisting as it did mainly of incitements to violence. In the Rocky Mountain News an article on the killing railed against the Chinese, noting pointedly that while Chinese women were not allowed to partake of stupefactants, many of Hop Alley’s clientele were white women, and many of them middle class and respectable. Several papers that had previously ignored the story of the shooting enthusiastically ran articles relating cursorily the facts of the case, followed by lengthy editorial rantings over the Yellow Threat to Labor, Morality, and White Rule.

  The boy and I did not discuss the matter while we worked that morning, and after lunch I sat up on the roof printing the previous day’s portrait sittings. They were an eclectic mix: a homely debutante with her enormous mother, the latter poised to marry a penniless associate of her late husband’s and the former bitterly opposed to the union (I gleaned this from their dialogue during the sitting, not one word of which was directed to me); an emaciated old miner who wanted a picture to send his brothers and sisters back in Pennsylvania; a newly married couple setting out for one of the mining towns where he was to make his fortune; and the elderly Chinese launderer. I imagined Hop Alley was in for a rough time of it tonight, with revenge-taking for the death of the pressman by men who never met him, with no concern for whether that vengeance was being visited upon Cowan’s killers or their blameless compatriots. I wondered about Dr. Marcy’s account of the theft of his morphine, for I had never heard of a Chinese hypo fiend; my understanding was that they used only opium, taken strictly by the pipe, and there were many hundreds more white morphine addicts in Denver than Chinamen altogether. I suspected he’d taken advantage of the incident to invent a theft that would cover his selling of morphine to hopheads, and I suspected further that the newspapers all knew this to be the case but didn’t want to give up a chance to stir things up.

  Upon descending to the gallery at one o’clock I found a man in a policeman’s uniform seated in a stuffed chair there, smoking a cheap-smelling cigar. A more-than-usually sullen Mrs. Fenster, engaged in cleaning the glass cases, introduced him to me as Patrolman Heinecker of the Denver Police. I thought I had seen him a time or two, rousting drunks and harassing streetwalkers.

 
“I just had some inquiries for Mrs. Fenster regarding her brother’s death,” he said, looking quite pleased with himself.

  “Brother-in-law,” she corrected sharply, plucking at the hem of her apron.

  He was clean-shaven and ruddy of complexion, though whiskey may have accounted for the latter. Two of the brass buttons of his blue tunic were undone, and his cap sat crooked on his head. “Mr. Sadlaw, do you know where this lady went last night?”

  “She was here, as she is every night.” I didn’t quite understand why I felt compelled to lie, but it came out as naturally as the truth might have; I hoped Mrs. Fenster hadn’t already contradicted me, and she raised her head and sniffed as though vindicated.

  “Because you see, one of Doc Marcy’s tenants downstairs from his surgery seen two old ladies come to call, both of ’em stout and short of stature, shortly after the arrival of the Chinee. The doc didn’t see ’em, but the dead man’s widow says to us, that sounds like my sisters, short and fat.” He licked his lips and looked over at Mrs. Fenster, who stood with her plump arms crossed over her broad, shapeless bosom. “Just wondering if Mrs. Fenster had any thoughts on the matter.”

  “None at all,” she said.

  My imagination began to feed me little ugly thoughts about Mrs. Fenster’s nocturnal outings, and her involvement with the old Mandarin, and I thought it best to distract the policeman from the similar thoughts that must have been percolating in his head. “Mrs. Fenster, I hope you haven’t neglected to offer Patrolman Heinecker a little drop of something.”

  “I beg your pardon,” she said, carefully separating each word in an exclamation of contemptuous disbelief rather than an apology or request for clarification.

  “Patrolman, would you care for a glass of whiskey?”

  He made noises as if to decline, then accepted. Beneath Mrs. Fenster’s baleful eye I fetched a glass and the bottle and poured him three fingers myself. This might have been overdoing it but I sensed that was his usual dose, and he had a look of great peace as I handed it to him.

  “That’s awfully kind of you, Mr. Sadlaw.”

  “I’m told he was quite a brute, is that so?” I looked over at the boy, who watched the proceedings from the doorway of the studio, and at Mrs. Fenster, who would, I hoped, deny my claim.

  “He was a sweet, gentle man, my sister’s husband, and I’ll not have you slandering him,” she said to my great pleasure. She daubed at her eyes with a handkerchief.

  “Still, what my friend Banbury—you know him, the editor of the Bulletin, where the dead man worked—Banbury told me he was a thug and a ruffian, with any number of people might have wanted him dead.”

  Mrs. Fenster wisely kept quiet this time, and the copper spoke next. “Matter of fact, we talked at some length with Mr. Banbury, and he agreed we ought to take a look at the two sisters. We said, Oh, we’re going to do just that.” My eye happened to be on Lem when the cop added, “He also thought we might have a word or two with the addled son, the one works for you.” The boy slowly closed the studio door, and Heinecker remained oblivious to his presence. He was halfway through his glass and seemed quite content.

  “Still, it’s not much of a loss, is it? You’re right, what we’re hearing is what a mean, quick-tempered son of a bitch he was, begging your pardon, Mrs. Fenster, including how he cracked the boy’s arm a few nights ago. Is that right? It was the boy’s sister who told us that, a little tiny girl, and she seemed more relieved than grieving at her papa’s passing.”

  “It’s true, the boy’s arm’s broken.”

  “Is he here?”

  “I sent him to the depot to pick up a parcel. Don’t know when he’ll return.”

  Heinecker knocked back the rest of the whiskey, and I would have offered him another glass but I didn’t want to seem too eager to see him off his stride. “That’s fine. I’ll be back by tomorrow. Meantime, you keep an eye on the woman and the boy.” He rose and headed for the door with his cap even more askew than before, and he walked with his fingers outstretched to meet the wallpaper. Going down the steps to the front door he had both hands on the left-hand balustrade, and he had to wait for a half a minute before opening the door to the exterior. The citizens of Denver were by no means unaccustomed at that time to inebriated policemen, but I hoped I had pushed his drunkenness to the point where a complaint might be made. Still, if he didn’t return, one of his colleagues would, and before I spoke to Mrs. Fenster about the whole business I wanted to verify something.

  I went to my room and opened the bottom drawer of my dresser. At its bottom was a bundle, wrapped not in the canvas sheet I had used, but in a piece of gunnysack. I placed it on the bed and unwrapped it; inside was a wooden case with a lock, and within that my long-ago trophy the Baby Dragoon. When I had put it away it was pristine, cleaned and oiled and polished and damned near as pretty as the day it left the Colt factory, or at any rate prettier than the day I took it off an insolent drummer in my Cottonwood saloon. Today it lay before me, cleaned after firing but hastily and not well, a whiff of Lucifer’s domain lingering in its barrel. I placed it back in the case, wrapped it back up in the rough cloth, and replaced it in the drawer, then sat down for a long think about what sort of discussion I was going to have with my housekeeper.

  HALF AN HOUR later I returned to the gallery and found her sweeping the floor. She stopped to face me, perfectly impassive, as though daring me to make a mention of her crime, or what she had used to commit it.

  “Mrs. Fenster, in the future if you wish to borrow any equipment, photographic or otherwise, please be so kind as to ask. In addition, the Colt was not returned in the same condition in which it was borrowed, and I would be grateful if you would return such items to me directly rather than attempting to slip them unnoticed back into place, improperly maintained. Do we understand each other?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Sadlaw,” she said with more formality than was her habit.

  The bell downstairs tinkled just then, and the old woman hastened down the stairs to answer it. I had a portrait sitting scheduled, and I went into the studio to make certain the boy was hard at work preparing the equipment and plates rather than cowering in the dark at the thought of the policeman come to arrest him and his auntie. I found him busily scouring the plates I had laid out, having seemingly forgotten Patrolman Heinecker.

  THAT EVENING I took my horse and carriage out and rode to Golden with the Baby Dragoon in its case next to me. Though there was no way of proving that this particular revolver was the one that was used to slaughter poor comatose Hiram Cowan, I preferred not to have it in the house to tempt Mrs. Fenster, who might decide she had other scores to settle. Priscilla emitted a little coo of surprise when she opened the door and found me on her threshold with a box in my hands.

  “Oh, a present.” She reached for it, and I pulled it away.

  “It’s not. It’s just something I’d like to keep here for a while if that’s all right.”

  She was disappointed and didn’t mind exaggerating it. “What is it, then?”

  “Never you mind, just let me keep it here for a few days.”

  She pouted and turned away from me, though she’d already let me into her parlor. “I don’t see why I should do anything nice for you,” she said.

  I handed her the laudanum bottle, which she accepted joylessly. “That’s not the same as something pretty.”

  I slid my arms around her waist from behind and cooed into her ear. “I promise next time I’ll bring you a little something, how’s that, Cilla dear?”

  “I surely don’t know,” she said, turning to face me and pulling away. I followed, assuming that we would be heading up the stairs, but she stopped me with a hand to my chest. “Not so fast, Mr. Sadlaw. Would you like some tea?”

  “Tea?” I repeated stupidly. “Not really, thank you.”

  “Fine, you be seated and I’ll be along presently.” I sat on the canapé where I’d screwed her half a dozen times and tried to understand what she was up to. Per
haps I did presume too much; this was the first time I’d ever visited where there’d been any sort of activity intervening between the door opening and sexual congress. There was a book on a side table within reach, and I opened it. “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” read the title page; I hoped this was a family heirloom and not another sign that she’d found religion. To my great relief I found that it was a very old edition, and cheaply printed. Its pages, likely unopened since the middle of the last century, cracked and separated when I opened it, bits of their edges flaking onto the parquet, and guiltily I flicked them underneath the canapé.

  After a few agonizing minutes she returned with a tray laden with porcelain teapot, cups, saucers, and creamer, and silver sugar bowl and spoons. She set them daintily down onto a small table and poured me my undesired tea, the very model of the genteel, sophisticated lady. She referred to me politely as “Mr. Sadlaw,” and if not for the fact that the participants were an unchaperoned and possibly still-married woman and a man of decidedly murky matrimonial status, the tableau might have been one from any well-heeled Denver home of quality. Naturally this pastiche of gentility had the unintended effect of making me want to despoil her there on the hearth rug, and I suppressed the physical result of that arousal with difficulty as she made small talk about an imaginary husband and children, who would be joining us presently. That she might have been describing the actual family she’d left behind in Iowa did not occur to me then, nor did the thought that the distinctions between fantasy and reality might, for poor Priscilla, have begun to blur.

  When she had tormented me sufficiently she returned the tray to her kitchen. “Now then, Mr. Sadlaw, you had something you wanted to leave here. Shall we go upstairs and find a good secure place to put it?”

  I merely nodded and followed, docile as a randy schoolboy.

  AN HOUR LATER it was dark and she lit a lamp next to the bed. “There’s something I’ve wanted to ask you,” I said as she ran her brush through her freshly disheveled hair.